Oxygen vacancies and interfacial engineering of RuO2/CeO2-NC heterojunction for pH-universal hydrogen evolution reaction

Ruthenium-based nanomaterials are considered to be promising electrocatalysts for HER due to their higher activity. However, the active site exposure is low, and the catalytic mass activity is low. In order to achieve the particular aims, several types of engineering, such as crystal engineering, topography engineering, heterostructures and support engineering, have been used to catalysts. Here we report RuO 2 supported on CeO 2 -NC, owing to the abundant heterostructures and the presence of oxygen vacancies, the RuO 2 /CeO 2 -NC catalyst showed outstanding HER performance (98.2 mV, 53 mV and 298 mV@100 mA cm −2 in acidic, alkaline and neutral, respectively). Moreover, RuO 2 /CeO 2 -NC also has an excellent electrocatalytic durability for 40 h. The experimental achievements show that oxygen vacancies and heterostructures could jointly enhance performance of catalyst HER.